Cynthia Grabo's Anticipating Surprise

The experience during the residential week about indicators and warning intelligence has been particularly enriching. It illustrated through practical exemples an important aspect of the intelligence cycle, and its related techniques. Among these, the indicators are a useful analytic technique helping to identify for example if a particular event is likely to happen. In the following short essay, we will reflect on the challenges and opportunities of indicators, referring to the extract from Cynthia Grabo’s Anticipating Surprise. The outcome of this reflection, is that indicators need to be carefully selected and validated to bring an added value to the analytic process, and not exclusively relying on military attitudes.

In the extract from Cynthia Grabo’s Anticipating Surprise, the author makes a clear distinction between military and political indicators. Grabo argues that military indicators are often perceived as unambiguous when compared to the political ones, because less
This results in a trend to include fewer political indicators on indicators’ lists and generate a sense of mistrust and misunderstanding of their importance. Despite Grabo’s acknowledgment of their imprecise nature, she points out that their critical role in warning must be duly weighed, to avoid emphasis on the military ones, as the political context is determinative of the interpretation of the military indicators, and thus need to be considered. From this example, we understand that the selection of a proper set of indicators is not the only challenge, but it is also important to be aware of the rating we give to a particular indicator, because if based on wrong assumptions, this technique can reinforce analytic